Free Republic

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accused Israel of “barbarism that surpasses Hitler” during its ground invasion of Gaza. Erdogan made the comment during a campaign speech Saturday in the Black Sea port city of Ordu. He is running for the presidency in elections next month. …

Israel accepts an Egyptian-proposed Gaza cease-fire; Hamas keeps firing. Hamas deliberately aims rockets at civilians; Israel painstakingly tries to avoid them, actually telephoning civilians in the area and dropping warning charges, so-called roof knocking. “Here’s the difference between us,” explains the Israeli prime minister. “We’re using missile defense to protect our civilians, and they’re using their civilians to protect their missiles.” Rarely does international politics present a moment of such moral clarity. Yet we routinely hear this Israel-Gaza fighting described as a morally equivalent “cycle of violence.” This is absurd. What possible interest can Israel have in cross-border fighting? Everyone...

The families of some of the 10 British victims of flight MH17 angrily accused “Russian gangsters” of killing their loved ones in an “act of war”, as evidence mounted that a missile supplied by Moscow brought down the Malaysia Airlines flight. Grieving relations also demanded that the airline and the aviation authorities explain why the Boeing 777, with 298 people on board, was allowed to fly over a war zone where three military aircraft had been shot down in the previous four days. Among the Britons killed in Thursday’s disaster in Ukraine were two undergraduates on their way to Australia,...

Christians in Mosul have been offered three choices by ISIS: 1. Convert to Islam. 2. Pay the ‘jizya’ tax that renders them dhimmis – i.e., second-class citizens granted limited protection if they hand over half an ounce of pure gold. 3. Death by the sword. They had until noon today to make up their minds. Bit of a no-brainer, really. Mosul’s Christians – Catholics and Orthodox who until this month had celebrated Mass in the city every Sunday for 1,600 years – are fleeing for safety. Perhaps, by the time you read this, Barack Obama – a weekly worshipper at...

Two days after repelling an Iraqi military attempt to retake the city of Tikrit, the Islamic State and its allies are said to have overran Camp Speicher, a large base just outside the city that was being used in the failed effort to retake the provincial capital. The Islamic State's Salahaddin Division claimed in an official statement released on Twitter yesterday that it overran Camp Speicher and is in "control of the airport and the base completely." In the statement, the Islamic State claimed it killed "scores" of Iraqi military personnel, including a brigadier general and a colonel. It also...

GAZA CITY — Even as Israeli forces pushed deeper into the Gaza Strip, unleashing intense artillery fire as they moved to demolish militants’ tunnels into Israel, several Hamas fighters slipped through one of the passages on Saturday and killed two Israeli soldiers on patrol before being driven back, the Israeli military said. The infiltration, the second in three days, was the latest indication that the tunnel network from Gaza into Israel is far more extensive than previously publicly known. The attack seemed to send a message that Hamas was undeterred in its efforts to launch assaults on Israel, and it...

Miss Conley might have had honeymoon visions of romance, but in reality she was in for a nasty fate. Despite embracing radical Islam, she wouldn’t have been able to erase the self-respect she was raised with in only six months. Many of the abuses the other women in the camp would have been used to, (imprisonment in the house, husbandly beatings, unwanted polygamy and a cheating husband), Miss Conley would have rebelled against. This “rebellion” would have given Terrorist Fiancé even more reason to beat her, starve her, or worse. Miss Conley is in an American jail where she’s not...

Christians were fleeing Iraq’s jihadist-held city of Mosul en masse on Friday after mosques relayed an ultimatum giving them a few hours to leave, the country’s Chaldean patriarch and witnesses said. Iraq is home to one of the world’s most ancient Christian communities, but their numbers have plummeted as attacks against them mounted after the US-led invasion in 2003, which unleashed a wave of sectarian violence. “Christian families are on their way to Dohuk and Arbil,” in the neighboring autonomous region of Kurdistan, Patriarch Louis Sako told AFP. “For the first time in the history of Iraq, Mosul is now...

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday slammed Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as an “illegitimate tyrant” and said Cairo could not be relied upon to negotiate a truce with Israel. "Is Sisi a party (to a ceasefire)? Sisi is a tyrant himself," Erdogan was quoted by the AFP news agency as having told reporters. "He is not different from the others," he said, adding that it was Egypt's current rulers who were blocking humanitarian aid channels to Gaza. Egypt's Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukri responded and said Erdogan's comments were "unacceptable". "They have no link with the events in...

Foreign Minister Sameh Shukri says Cairo's offer 'provides the needs of all sides.' Egypt does not have any plans to revise its ceasefire proposal to end the fighting in Gaza, Foreign Minister Sameh Shukrisaid in a joint press conference with his French counterpart Laurent Fabius in Cairo. "It provides the needs of all sides and we will continue to offer it, hoping to get their support as soon as possible," said Shukri, referring to the initiative rejected by Hamas. On Friday, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas asked France to use its influence on Hamas allies such as Turkey and Qatar to...

Analysis: Israel's intelligence community sees Cairo as only real platform capable of influencing Hamas. With all the chatter incessantly coming out of the mouths of experts sitting in air-conditioned television studios and offering their different solutions to the Hamas problem, it's really hard to understand what is going on behind the scenes. But there is one thing we can all agree on: The news about a ceasefire will come from one place only – Cairo. The common estimate among the decision makers is that the Egyptians are the only ones who can end the fighting. The Egyptian capital serves as...

Haaretz learned that Lieberman told Borg Brende, Norway’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, who is visiting Israel, that Hamas lied when it said Cairo had not sent it the cease-fire proposal, which Israel initially accepted. He said Egyptian intelligence officials had given the details of the initiative to Mousa Abu-Marzook, head of the Hamas mission in Cairo. Meanwhile, Israel agreed on Wednesday night to a request from Robert Serry, the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East for UNRWA, to a five-hour cease-fire on Thursday in order to allow humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip. “Hamas was ready to consider the...

Palestinian and other Arab commentators are blasting Egypt's cease-fire offer this week in the Israeli-Gazan fighting, saying it was a gift to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who accepted it, and a trap for Hamas, which rejected it. Azmi Bishara, the fugitive former Knesset member who now heads the Arab Center for Research and Policy in Doha, Qatar, wrote in the pan-Arab alaraby.co.uk that the offer gave no relief to Gaza, nor freedom for the Hamas members recently returned to Israeli prisons. "This Egyptian declaration represents a stab in the back to the resistance and the people of Gaza. … [T]his...

A day after Jewish comedian Jon Stewart caused outrage with a segment on his Daily Show on the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, he hosted former Secretary of State, and wannabe president, Hillary Clinton on his show to address the topic. After Stewart attempted to draw her into criticizing Israel, Clinton swiftly put him in his place. Stewart: Can we at least agree that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is overwhelming and that the world must do more for the people who are trapped by this conflict? Clinton: And they’re trapped by their leadership. unfortunately, it’s a two-pronged trapping that is committed...

When a New York Times article cast doubt on the accusation Usama bin Laden had a hand in the 1998 bombings of African embassies, President Clinton questioned his own CIA, according to a note he scrawled to his national security adviser The memo, part of a 1,000-page release of documents Friday afternoon by the National Archives, was written after the president apparently read an article in the self-professed "paper of record" casting doubt on the U.S. Justice Department's case that the Al Qaeda mastermind was involved in the Aug. 7, 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Some...

A prominent American Jewish organization is denouncing The Washington Post for posting an animated cartoon on its YouTube channel depicting Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu beating a Palestinian infant. The caricature is aimed at apportioning blame equally between Israel and Hamas for the suffering of Gazan civilians. It was created by Ann Telnaes, one of the newspaper’s editorial cartoonists. The Simon Wiesenthal Center declared its outrage over the cartoon. In a statement released to news agencies on Friday, the center’s associate dean, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, said the clip was “disgusting.” "It is disgusting that The Washington Post would present an animated...

It was strange. Joe Scarborough had just completed a comprehensive indictment of failed American foreign policy around the globe. But at the very moment when he should have laid those disasters at the feet of the sitting President of the United States, Scarborough came down with a bad case of . . . cold feet. Scarborough laid out to David Gregory a tour d'horizon of failed American foreign policy from the Middle East, to Iran, to Russia/Ukraine, describing it as "one disaster after another." But perhaps fearful of where the ineluctable logic of his comments was taking him, Scarborough suddenly...

MK Hanin Zoabi (Balad) took her campaign against Israel to a whole new level this week, Israel Hayom reports Friday—after she published an article on Hamas’s official website encouraging an Islamist uprising against the Jewish state. Zoabi encouraged all Arab countries to help stoke a “popular uprising” against Israel, halt security coordination with the Palestinian Authority (PA) police in Judea and Samaria, and lay siege to the region. Zoabi—who is a member of the Israeli Knesset—also put the word “Israel” in quotation marks for the entire article. The inflammatory piece also attacks Operation Protective Edge against Hamas, which seeks to...

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As the sun went down over Kabul on Saturday July 13, Afghanistan’s future hung in the balance. Accusations of fraud in the country’s recent presidential election had paralyzed the country’s politics and threatened to trigger a civil war that could destroy the progress America’s costly military and diplomatic efforts had delivered since 2001....